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Comment by timjahn | Hacker News Reader

I find it sad how people are so lazy when it comes to long form content. I understand we all might not have time at the moment for the long form content, but there is time somewhere in the day. Somewhere.

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I personally think there's a difference between substantial long-form content and the standardized "elongated-form" content that all starts out with something like "It was a cold December morning and the sparse streaks of light crept softly through...". That's purely for entertainment value over informational value, and I can see why the parent commenter could grow tired of it. As soon as I saw the first line of this article, I knew it was going to be a haystack I didn't feel like perusing for needles of information.

Yes, these storytale leads make me think, "get to the blasted point already!"

It's not always laziness; since nobody can read everything, people need help deciding which stuff to read.

I need a TL;DR and other's people's feedback on the piece to help me decide which one it's going to be.

Furthermore, for the ones I don't read, it's nice to have a TL;DR so I'm at least aware of the major points.

Yeah, when I'm offline, with no distractions, and with a printed copy of the NYT. The morning commute in public transit may be a good situation, but I can't easily get a printed copy of the NYT here every morning.

I guess if lazyness == not giving a fuck to read the whole thing because I'm busying doing cool shit (to me) -ness

To add to this point: nobody can read all the long-form journalism out there. I love long pieces, read at least a couple each day, but I spent 20 seconds reading the intro to this piece and decided it wasn't worth my time. That's not to say it shouldn't be written that way, just that I'd personally read something else than this. So instead I just glanced at the HN comments to see if I was missing out.

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